


A Shining Star Over Gotham : A Last Daughter of Krypton Story

by Moirae (TigerDragon), TiaNadiezja



Series: Stranger in a Strange Land [2]
Category: Batman (Comics), DCU, Supergirl
Genre: Bat Family, Christmas, F/F, F/M, Families of Choice, Family, First Time, Gifts, Grief/Mourning, Secret Identity, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-25
Updated: 2012-12-31
Packaged: 2017-11-22 11:42:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/609463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/Moirae, https://archiveofourown.org/users/TiaNadiezja/pseuds/TiaNadiezja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Local traditions can be a puzzling thing for any immigrant. Kara Zor-El knows this, has prepared for it, and is ready to be open-minded. What she can't understand, however, is why everyone around her insists on attaching such maddening importance to this infernal <i>Christmas</i> holiday, and to her acquiring the 'spirit of the season.' Will her first Christmas in the Wayne household turn out to be nothing but a source of frustration, or is there something in this quaint Earth custom for the Last Daughter of Krypton?</p><p>Read and find out. ;)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lilyoftheval5](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilyoftheval5/gifts).



> For those who've been following our (admittedly laborious) progress on _Last Daughter of Krypton_ , here's a small Christmas present we hope you'll all enjoy over the holidays. When we decided we were going to do a Christmas collection this year, the chance to write about Kara and her first Christmas with the Waynes was irresistible, so this was one of the first stories we started. Unfortunately, it's also proving to be one of the longest, so only two chapters are ready today. The third will be along later in the week, when we've finished editing it. :) Try not to be too impatient with us.
> 
> As for our gift dedication on this fic, lilyoftheval5 was our first comment on the main story and remains one of our favorites. We hope it continues to be a source of pleasure to her, however slow in coming, and that this likewise gives her a chance to enjoy the expanded Wayne family.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who loves Kara as much as we do,  
> Dragon and Tia

Fifteen days before Christmas, with one of the worst winter storms on record brewing to the east and a domestic terror group with a thing for five-piece brass bands on the loose in Gotham, Kara Zor-El was hip deep in paperwork for her newly acquired energy subsidiary (metaphorically) and elbow deep in crime scene evidence (literally).  It was a time for focus, detachment and discipline - for the sober application of her skills to the new professions she had chosen. It was not a time for interruptions, distractions or family overtures.  
  
Naturally, therefore, she received all three in a single package.  
  
“Alfred,” she called out from beneath the car-turned-bomb-delivery-package which she was in the midst of disassembling one forensically vital step at a time, “stop hovering. Even with the lead paint on this vehicle, I can still hear your heart and your breathing. Whatever it is, tell me or leave. Your patience is distracting.”  
  
“Miss Claire,” Alfred rejoined with his usual deferential respect, “your mail has arrived.”  
  
She blew out a long breath and used her laser-scalpel to peel away another slice of the exhaust system, setting it into one of the waiting analysis bins that hummed obediently as its stasis generator kicked to life. “I seem to recall telling you to leave my mail on my desk upstairs. Which means that either you have something which you think wouldn’t belong on Claire Wayne’s desk and are unusually paranoid about people wandering the mansion or you’ve decided to meddle. Shall I deduce which, or will you spare me the trouble by telling me?  
  
He replied with one of his delicately dismissive throat-clearings, and she heard the click of metal on metal as he put something on the document table a few feet behind the instrument racks. “I would not wish to be a distraction.”  
  
Kara sighed, closed her eyes, and silently begged Rao for patience. “Both, then?”  
  
“Both,” he agreed. “I shall leave you to your work.”  
  
 _Clever old snapping turtle,_ she thought after him as his feet retreated up the stairs. _You know I’m going to be curious what could possibly be both, and that I’m going to spend as long as I’m under this car wondering about it. So do I give in to curiosity, accept the distraction and check, or do I put up with the mental grit in my gears until I finish and refuse you the satisfaction?_ Logic suggested disposing of the distraction as quickly as possible. Pride suggested otherwise.  
  
Pride, naturally, won. She set her teeth, opened her eyes again and reactivated her laser scalpel. _Six more segments,_ she decided, _and I will be out of trays. That will be soon enough._  
  
“You have a tin of Martha Kent’s Christmas cookies on the document table.”  Bruce Wayne’s voice came, directly above her ankles, before the sound of his heartbeat.  “There is likely a note inside, inviting you to the Kent family Christmas meal.  I understand that her turkey is, as Clark puts it, ‘heaven stuffed with corn bread, Bruce, heaven stuffed with corn bread.’”  
  
“Do you enjoy her Christmas cookies?” Kara inquired, shifting a few inches to take her first cut on the floorboards above the exhaust system.  
  
“They are slightly more sweet than is my preference.  Thankfully, I do not have to suffer them long - Richard and Damien will, between them, eat the two tins Clark sends every year themselves in a day.”  
  
“Give it to them, then. Dispose of the note.” The segment of floorboard came loose smoothly, and she settled it into the waiting evidence bin before carefully extracting herself and the bins from beneath the vehicle without further disturbing it. “These are ready for analysis. A moment.” She shrugged her shoulders carefully, working the tension-tight muscles loose, then flickered like a skipped video frame and reappeared with a cleaning cloth in her hands in lieu of the bins. “The computer should have a full molecular model in a few minutes.”  
  
“You don’t want to read the note?”  A note - a small note, but still a note - of surprise entered Bruce’s voice.  
  
Kara wiped her hands carefully, letting her eyes wander back to the car for another redundant microscopic scan of its surface as she gauged her control of her voice. Adequate, she decided. “I expect that it will include much the same content as their last three notes, two phone messages and the only e-mail from them which I have ever received,” she noted cooly. “I do not see any useful purpose in indulging the repetition.”  
  
“Martha and Jonathan can be rather... insistent... when they believe they know your best interests.”  Bruce made his way over to the computer.  “What are they trying to convince you of?”  
  
“To attend,” she answered crisply, gliding up the steps behind him and settling into the chair facing the station beside his. “I would think that would be obvious.”  
  
“The family Christmas dinner?”  Bruce nodded.  “Then you do not intend to do so?”  
  
“I do not. Turkey or otherwise.” Kara leaned back more firmly into the chair, letting the cushions of it absorb the tiniest fraction of her tension, and reached out to flick the uploading data from her display to his. “The organic residue is as expected, but the spectrographic analysis contains new data.”  
  
Bruce leaned forward to look over the data.  “Aluminum-titanium alloy.  Used most heavily in aerospace and heavy industrial applications... and not at all in a vehicle’s exhaust system.  The most likely source of them is the car being parked in one of the warehouses of the Second Street metal recycling plant... they receive machines from the airplane factory uptown.”  He zoomed in.  “They were in the fuel system... the car was parked with the fuel cap off.  Why are you not going?”  
  
Kara was already gone.  
  
There was a pie ten days before Christmas, and a long letter three days later. Kara left the pie on the table in the den in front of the television and read the letter before tucking it into the concealed drawer of her desk and composing a short, terse and unambiguous reply. Bruce persisted in his questions, and she persisted in answering as few of them as possible. The terrorists were caught after the man she’d caught in the warehouse finally broke down under interrogation - she participated in the capture personally, as much to lose a full afternoon in the discipline of the task as because she felt the police might require well-armed assistance. The storm finally ceased looming and crashed down on the city on the seventh day before Christmas, the snarling clouds lashing the city with ice-laden wind and thick flurries of snow, and for two days she occupied herself principally with search and rescue operations for those unfortunates caught out by the weather. It was the heaviest snowfall and sharpest temperature drop in sixty-five years, and not a single citizen of Gotham died from exposure. Kara was proud of that.  
  
Then there was nothing to do but wait, read corporate reports and watch the snow pile up on the broad walls of Wayne Manor.  
  
“Bruce loves snow this time of year.”  Richard Grayson was quiet as he approached her in the upstairs library three days before Christmas, but she heard his footsteps before his heartbeat and his heartbeat before he spoke.  “If we keep getting it at this pace, he might crack a smile people who don’t live here could notice by the end of Christmas Eve.”  
  
“I thought you were in New York.” Kara leaned her head back over the arm of the couch to look at him, her laptop braced across her thighs and her back almost flat against the cushions - a posture that did nothing at all to minimize the way the business skirt-suit she’d pulled out of her closet this morning clung to her, and she well knew it. “Something about the Uzbek mob. Not to mention the minor detail that the roads are closed for miles.”  
  
“I know people. Some of those people have a Watchtower teleport array.”  It was an effort for Richard not to visibly show the response of his body to her outfit, but he did an admirable job of it.  “I didn’t want to miss Christmas.  Not to mention that someone has to keep you and Bruce from going mad with no crime to fight, so I’m staying until after the holiday.  My contacts in New York can handle things until I get back.”  
  
“Christmas.” Kara made a face and rolled her head back up, returning those piercing blue eyes to the screen in front of her. “Are all humans obsessed with this miserable holiday?”  
  
“Miserable?”  Richard raised an eyebrow.  “It’s pretty much the best day of the year, as far as I’m concerned.  Tim prefers Halloween, and Damien says his favorite day is ‘whenever Drake finds himself in exceptional but nonfatal misfortune.’  Damien lights up when he sees the tree, though, so I’m not sure I believe him.  It’s always been the best day of the year, in this house... at least, for as long as I’ve been here.”  
  
“Hmph.” Kara frowned at the laptop, fingers blurring across the keys.  
  
“I think the words you’re looking for are ‘bah, humbug,’” Richard suggested amiably.  
  
She rolled her head back to arch an eyebrow up at him again. “Excuse me?”  
  
“You’ve done a rather thorough reading of Earth literature, and you’ve missed _A Christmas Carol_?”  Richard blinked in surprise.  “I have no idea how that could possibly happen.  If you don’t finish that work you’re doing, will Wayne Industries collapse?”  
  
“No. Neither will Lumen Futuristics or Astra Technologies, for that matter - I’m looking for companies with promising ideas to patent-strip. Why?”  
  
“Because, if it won’t destroy the family fortune, you’re going to drop what you’re doing right now and come down to the den with me.”  Richard reached for her hand, and she shifted the laptop to balance on her right palm as she rolled off the couch to hover in the air, her legs still crossed.  
  
“Why am I doing anything of the sort?” she inquired, arching an eyebrow up at the man who - attractive as he was and often as she’d been warming his bed of late - was decidedly not in a position to be giving her instructions.  
  
“Because your cultural education is obviously deeply lacking, and myself, Mr. Dickens, and Mr. Henson are going to rectify that.”  
  
Her eyebrow rose another few millimeters, and she clicked the laptop closed one-handed before letting it drop to the couch and lowering her feet to the floor. “As an alternative suggestion,” she murmured, cocking her hip slightly and tossing her hair, “you could come upstairs with me and do what we would have been doing since the moment you arrived if I had known you were here.”  
  
“Tempting.  We could compromise and do both, in the same sequence they were suggested.”  Richard raised an eyebrow of his own, managing his infuriatingly endearing expression.  
  
She tried to glare, but had to settle for an annoyed and lopsided smile. “How does this constitute compromise, precisely, when you receive what you want _and_ sexual favors?”  
  
“First, you get a cultural education, which is of great value.  Second, you know you enjoy the sex as much as I do.”  Richard laughed.  “You in?”  
  
“Damn you,” she muttered under her breath.  
  
Now he was grinning, which was even more irritatingly charming. “Is that a yes?”  
  
“Stop gloating and fetch popcorn. I will not endure this ludicrous ‘educational’ viewing without it.”  
  
The movie was, in the end, at least moderately amusing. On the other hand, it made clear that Richard had been comparing her feelings regarding Christmas to the villain of the piece, which she could not allow to go unanswered. Fortunately, she had a black and red lingerie ensemble which he had not yet seen and the ability to float well out of his reach.  
  
There was something to be said for advanced planning.


	2. Chapter 2

By the time she was done wearing Richard out and left him asleep in her bed, it was well past midnight, and Kara glided through the big house with all the silence of a golden-haired wraith. It wasn’t that she was avoiding speaking to anyone, exactly, so much as she had no desire to increase the chances of it. As pleasantly distracting as Richard could be, he did little to warm the ice clinging to her heart. She doubted anything but the swift winds and brilliant sunlight of spring would.  
  
Her laptop was still waiting in the upstairs library, and when she flicked it open to resume her research she found a contact request flashing in her alert bar. Barbara. The edge of her mouth quirked up, and she tapped the _connect_ bar as a tiny shift in her bioelectric field shifted all of her hair to raven-black. Electrically color-sensitive dye - another of Bruce's little gifts to her.  
  
“Should you be enjoying the Caribbean breeze and the free drinks instead of wasting time on calling your boss?” she inquired when the video connection resolved into a clear image of Barbara’s face.  
  
“I always worry when I’m not going to be in Gotham for Christmas.”  Barbara smiled, adjusting the position of her camera drone.  “And Bruce is apparently asleep; he didn’t answer when I called him.  How is everyone?”  
  
“Rested,” Claire Wayne replied with a droll little smile. “We’re snowed in here, so there’s nothing to do but antagonize the family. Bruce has been playing Christmas carols and staring at the snow as though he’s expecting it to do a song and dance number. Damien is his usual intolerable self, augmented by what seems to be a nearly constant sugar high, and Timothy is incessantly watching the most insipid Christmas movies imaginable. He has a schedule for them - it’s positively tragic. Richard is … well, Richard. Trying to encourage me to enjoy myself. ”  
  
“Enjoying yourself is a good idea.  Keeps you from going insane.  And, on that note, Claire, how are you?  Enjoying the holiday?”  Barbara winked.  “I don’t expect you’re enjoying it as much as I am.  You don’t have cabana boys bringing you fruity drinks with little umbrellas.  And you’re not going to talk Richard into it... believe me, I tried.”  
  
“Maybe I’m more persuasive than you are,” Claire mused, her eyes twinkling.  
  
“Not that much.”  Barbara smirked.  “But you didn’t answer my question.”  
  
Kara leaned back and tossed her head a little, burying herself deeper in Claire’s mocking arrogance. “Funny, isn’t it? You’d almost think I didn’t want to.”  
  
“You’d almost think you have a choice.  You keep forgetting... secrets don’t work with me.”  Barbara met Kara’s eyes.  “Though your lack of answer already gives me the basics... no, you’re not enjoying your holiday.  The next question is why.”  
  
“Bruce has been asking that for almost two weeks. He hasn’t gotten an answer yet.” Kara let Claire drop away and shrugged, her eyes cold and crystalline blue. “So, all-knowing one, why don’t you tell me?”  
  
“Because I can’t hack your brain.  But if I had to hazard a guess... you don’t understand the holiday, everyone’s telling you it’s a time to be happy without telling you why, a certain Kansan reporter keeps trying to drag you to his parents’ house for homestyle cooking you don’t recognize and ceremonies you don’t understand, and Richard made you watch the Muppet version of _A Christmas Carol_ when everyone knows the Mickey Mouse one is better.  Am I warm?”  
  
Kara held up a hand like a scale level and tipped it back and forth a few times. “I understand the holiday very well. I find it irritating that everyone continues to presume that I do not. Other than that, however, you are entirely correct.”  
  
“Has anyone told you the story of Richard’s first year there... his first Christmas at the manor?”  Barbara paused.  “Of course not.  Bruce wouldn’t think it was something you’d need to hear, Alfred wouldn’t think it was his place, and Richard doesn’t know the whole story.  But it’s the reason Bruce makes such a deal of Christmas in the first place.  Do you have a few minutes?”  
  
“Unless I want to do something absurdly dramatic like fly to Mars for the holiday, I have nothing but time. Actually, I’d have nothing but time there as well, but the trip would at least kill a day or two.” The corner of Kara’s lip quirked. “Are you the Ghost of Christmas Past, then?”  
  
“Maybe so.”  Barbara lowered her voice a bit.  “Richard’s first year... his parents’ deaths were still completely raw, and Bruce, after a few days of doing everything right, fell back on old habits - he was spending his time in solitude.  Richard was left to spend hours wandering the Manor... it’s how he found the Batcave in the first place.  They bonded a bit chasing criminals, but when the costumes came off... they were more roommates than family.  Bruce wasn’t celebrating Christmas at the time... it reminded him too much of the parents he’d lost, and not in a good way.  But Alfred was determined that ‘young Master Grayson’ would have at least one day of real joy that year.  So he went all-out... decorations and gifts and a big tree with all the trimmings.  He bought it all in bits and pieces in the months before Christmas and stored it away in closets he knew Bruce never checked, and set it all up in one night, while Bruce was out chasing thugs he doesn’t remember the names of and Richard was sleeping.  Bruce woke Christmas morning to find Alfred and Richard in the den, by the fire, under that big picture of Thomas Wayne.  Richard had a toy train in one hand and a candy cane in the other, and was laughing in a way Bruce had never seen from him before.  He was laughing like a _child._  And, before he knew it, Bruce was sitting on the floor, next to Alfred and Richard, and passing Richard the next present, and opening one of his own.  That day was when the people living in that house really became a family... and they’ve never stopped being one, even as more have come to live there.  That’s why Christmas is such an important day to Bruce.”  
  
Kara looked away from the screen and stared out the window into the dusky white of the still falling snow, her lips pressed tight to hold in the defensive sharpness that would have ended the conversation and kept it ended. There were days - not many, but days - when she was sure she loved Barbara. At moments like this, pinned on the point of one of her all too pointed morality tales, she was almost as sure that she hated her.  
  
“Even Damien seems to be enjoying himself,” she allowed after ninety-seven seconds of silence. “Above and beyond the sweets.”  
  
Barbara gave Kara a few more moments before she spoke again.  “Since I won’t be there this year, will you light Sarah’s candle for me?”  
  
“Of course,” Kara promised at once, as if she knew what was being asked or even who Sarah was. Anything that moved away from that horrible, aching silence had to be an improvement. “I’ll take care of it. You just enjoy the sun and the surf and the cabana boys enough for both of us.”  
  
“Thank you, Kara.  I’d better get going... the cabana boys aren’t going to bring drinks if I’m distracted.  I’ll call again on Christmas.”  
  
“I’m sure everyone will want to talk to you,” Kara agreed, her finger already resting against the _disconnect_ hotkey. “Don’t forget to bring that bikini back with you, either.”  
  
“Believe me, I won’t.  Talk to you in a couple of days.”  Barbara cut the feed, and Kara closed the computer to return the room to darkness. She sat there a long time, staring blindly out at the snow and letting the tears run down her cheeks, and it was late into the morning when she finally felt herself enough to come down to breakfast.  
  
Tim, seated at the left hand of the head of the table and working his way through a sensible breakfast of cereal and toast and a glass of mixed exotic juices that would have been the envy of every health nut in Gotham, looked up when Kara came in and cleared his throat. “Good morning, Claire, and merry Christmas,” he said, _and would you like to talk about it?_  he finished silently in that way that only Bruce and Tim could finish their sentences on the inflection of voice alone. She glared at him, which left him completely unmoved, and tried ignoring him while she prepared her own plate of eggs, bacon, ham, warm turkey and hash browns. When even that failed to shake the gently inquisitive look off his face, she sat down across from him with a quietly exasperated sigh and resumed glaring.  
  
“Do you practice that look,” she finally asked, “or does it just come naturally?”  
  
“I’ve never been quite sure of that myself.”  He cut a piece off his toast with a knife and bit into it, expression aggravatingly thoughtful.  “I’m pretty sure it’s an instinct honed by experience.”  
  
Kara swore under her breath in six of the seven dominant dialects of Kryptonian before giving it up as a lost cause. “It makes it impossible to be properly annoyed with you for prying, you know.”  
  
“Why do you think I’ve practiced it so much?”  He allowed a tiny bit of infuriating smugness to pass across his face.  “So, do you?”  
  
“No.” She attacked her eggs with her fork, careful not to scrape the plate (or break the table) while she did. “If I did, I would have talked to Bruce about it, or Richard, or Barbara, or any of the other well-meaning individuals who have attempted to convince me to ‘keep Christmas in my heart.’”  
  
“All right.  I won’t press.”  He leaned forward to take a bite of his cereal, careful not to drip any milk.  “But your cousin is going to be at the house by the end of the day, and I expect he won’t be nearly as polite as I am.”  
  
Kara sighed and set the fork down so she could rest her face in her palms. _Kal,_ she swore softly under her breath, _will you never learn to mind your own damn business?_ When the universe failed to provide a sufficiently clear or reassuring answer, she returned her attention to her breakfast - which, at least, was comfortably unable to do anything she didn’t want it to. “The problem with living in a house full of detectives,” she finally muttered, “is that they have an annoying tendency to treat one’s personal problems as puzzles to solve. Do you ever find that frustrating, Timothy?”  
  
“Occasionally.  But, eventually, I realized I liked it for the most part.”  He took a long sip of his juice, then regarded it for a moment.  “Needs more acai...”  
  
“Or pomegranate,” Kara suggested. “That would improve the chemical mixture for both health and taste purposes substantially.”  
  
“It’s a bit too tart already... pomegranate would improve how savory it is, but also make it more tart.”  Tim took another sip.  “They’re good at being concerned, and finding reasons to be concerned, because they’re detectives.  But they’re concerned in the first place because they’re family.  I like family.”  
  
Kara looked up sharply, her tongue stopped just at the back of her teeth, and then spoke in a very careful voice that she knew gave away how strongly she was holding back the questions that had boiled up in her head. “I don’t know how to ask what I want to ask you without giving you offense or hurt, Timothy,” she finally confessed.  
  
“Then just ask, and I’ll take it in a spirit of inoffensiveness.”  Tim pushed the juice aside to attack his cereal again, watching her as he did.  
  
“Christmas is a time for family,” she finally began, “a holiday for the exchange of gifts and reinforcement of religious sentiment around the communal hearth with those who have been with one since childhood. It is a celebration of familial tradition and renewal in the darkest part of the year. But your family is dead, Timothy.”  
  
“My parents are dead.  But my family... my living family... is here, in this house.  Bruce and Richard and Damien and Alfred.  You too.”  He smiled to her, folding his hands on the table.  “The people who know me best, and care for me anyway.”  
  
Kara looked down and frowned, chewing a strip of bacon slowly and toying with her glass of juice. “You are the second person to suggest to me that a new family can be constructed to replace absent or lost family. I am not sure that I can agree, but I cannot articulate the nature of my disagreement. It is very frustrating.”  
  
“Take your time with it, then.”  Tim drummed his fingers on the table before giving her another inquisitive look.  “What are you going to tell your cousin when he gets here?”  
  
“I haven’t really decided. It’s something I’m still...” Kara paused, sighed, and vanished the rest of her food between one tap of Tim’s fingers and another. “Something I no longer have time to be thinking about. Pardon me, Timothy, but I need to answer the door.”  
  
The doorbell rang.  
  
“Go ahead.  I’ll talk to you when you’re done with him.”  Tim waved toward the front door, and Kara straightened her hair and her suit jacket at a significant fraction of the speed of sound while she walked to the front door of Wayne Manor and opened it.  
  
There was a faint dusting of snow in Clark Kent’s dark hair and fog on his glasses, not to mention the purely unnecessary scarf, gloves and thick coat her cousin insisted on wearing. It was an artful deception, she was forced to admit for what felt like the thousandth time, but it still grated. At least he wasn’t doing the slight hunch and the owlish stare - that would have been genuinely irritating.  “Merry Christmas, Kara,” he finally spoke, thankfully in his own voice instead of Clark Kent’s.  "Can I come in?”  
  
“Bruce would object to me leaving you standing in the snow, despite the fact that it would not inconvenience you in the slightest.” Kara stepped to the side and gestured him in. “Enter, cousin.”  
  
Clark stepped through the door and carefully knocked the snow from his shoes, rubbing his hands together and adjusting his coat to shake the snow away. It was an unnecessary as it was reflexive, and for some reason it only increased her frustration with him. “Ma’s making enough food for four tomorrow.  She’s really hoping you’ll change your mind about attending dinner.  So am I.”  
  
Kara melted back a few feet further into the broad foyer, using the distance so she wouldn’t have to look up at him too sharply and folding her arms and tossing her head to spill the darkness of her color-ablated hair down into her face. She realized as she did it that she was adopting Claire’s public mannerism when people tried to speak to her about her father: hurt, reserved, aloof and all sharp edges. “I thought my note was quite clear on my intentions, Kal.”  
  
“It was... almost to the point of being rude.  You’re very good at skirting that edge...”  He sighed, scratching the back of his head.  “Your note didn’t say why, though.”  
  
“It didn’t.” She arched an eyebrow at him, every inch the haughty half-daughter of the wealthiest man in Gotham. “Fancy that.”  
  
“And you’re not going to tell me now, either, are you?”  
  
“They are not my family, Kal.” Her eyes flared cerulean blue, and her jaw set painfully tightly as she controlled her tone. “This is not my world. I do not worship their God. I have no interest in their damned traditions, and if I am forced to sit through a meal with people who look at me as though I am a lost kitten in need of a basket to sleep in one more time I may seriously consider violence. Does that suffice for an explanation, my cousin, or shall I go on? Shall I fly to Kansas and tell them so in so many words - will that satisfy you?”  
  
“There’s no need for that. They’re good... good people”  Clark took a step back, eyes stricken, as if seeing her again for the first time. “They just want you to be at home, Kara. They don’t mean anything by it.”  
  
“At home, like you are?” Kara’s anger melted away at the hurt in his eyes, and she took an involuntary step toward him as though to reach up and take him in her arms. Stopped and forced herself to breathe, because he wouldn’t understand that the embrace changed nothing. “Our family is dead, Kal. Our world is dead. I still remember the Festival of Light, the songs to the Flamebird, the great shining beacon of the Temple of Rao. I remember every one of the gift-days we shared, when you were small enough to hold in my arms and listen to me fret about my examinations and hope for a chance to use the spatial lensing array as a gift from your father. Your mother made the most delicious _tabra_ tarts - do you remember? They were her specialty, everyone’s favorite at family gather-meals. My father would even leave off debating with yours to steal one fresh from the oven. But you don’t remember, do you? You don’t remember any of it, because you were just a child.” There were tears on her cheeks now, and she wiped them away furiously as she hugged herself. “To you, Christmas is nights in the Kansas cold singing carols in that ramshackle little church and saying your prayers with John and Martha before falling asleep with dreams of model trains and a new bicycle dancing in your head. It’s your foster mother’s turkey cooking, the imprinted smell of it thick with remembered emotion. It’s standing in the snow in a cornfield looking up and imagining a guiding star in the sky.”  
  
There was pain in Clark’s face now, the pain he always showed when she spoke of Krypton, but it was the longing there that cut her deep enough to bleed. He truly did think he could wipe that pain away from her, or at least bury it below layers of homespun warmth the way he had, and even as that made Kara’s heart thunder with fury, it drew a tighter net of control around her voice - he was her cousin, still, and to hurt him was like twisting a knife in her own hand.  
  
She went on grimly, refusing to let either of them escape the words that needed saying. “But it won’t ever be any of those things to me, Kal, and you can’t share them with me by dragging me to Kansas and sitting me at yet another of these stupid Earth tradition-meals. The Kents can’t adopt me and give me their Christmas spirit any more than you can. I am not Ebenezer Scrooge, estranged from his family by pride and greed - my family, my home, my _world_ were burned from the face of the universe by arrogance and folly.” Her voice cut off, flat and taut, and it was a long silent breath before she whispered, “They were your family, too.”  
  
It took him a long moment by human standards, an eternity by Kryptonian standards, to answer, and when he did, his voice was halting, wounded and apologetic at once.  “... I need to help Ma with the decorations.”  
  
“Yes.” She hesitated, still boiling inside, then managed to find something like a normal tone from the deep vaults of her affection for him. “Please give them my regards and well-wishes.”  
  
“I will.  Merry Christmas.”  Clark let his gaze linger on her a moment longer, long enough for him to clear the most obvious hurt from his face before continuing.  “Stay safe.  I’ll drop the presents off later.”  
  
She inclined her head in understanding, if not precisely agreement. “The snow ensures I have very little opportunity to indulge my latest hobby, cousin - even Gotham criminals are inclined, for the most part, not to venture out into this drek. On the subject of presents, however, I understand that it is traditional to give gifts to the family members of one’s friends and relatives during the Christmas season. Have I understood that properly?”  
  
“You have.”  Clark nodded, a spark of hope or perhaps carefully restrained anticipation in his eyes as he considered whether to go on. He did.  “Ma and Pa have presents for you and for Bruce - for Batman, rather.  And I have some for most of the people here.”  
  
“Wait,” she murmured softly, then flickered with a swiftness easy enough for him to follow but still neatly nestled between two ticks of the foyer’s great grandfather clock. She returned to him with six packages wrapped in a shimmery, metallic paper and held them out like the peace offering they were. “For yourself, Jonathan, Martha, Lois and your friends Peter and Lana. I presume that they will be joining the four of you for the evening, and that Diana will not?”  
  
Clark reached out and took the boxes carefully, his eyes flicking over them and picking out the small tags labeled in Kara’s neat, efficient hand, and then the edges of his mouth turned up as his eyebrows rose. “Lead?”  
  
“Casperium.” Kara chuckled softly, shaking her head. “Bruce’s cowl was too heavy, and he wanted an alloy that would do as well as lead for the purpose. I also suggested it might be best if he stopped risking lead poisoning every time he wore that lining. It’s marginally less effective - if you stare hard enough, you’ll get a severely distorted image instead of nothing at all - but it suffices to the purpose.”  
  
“I’ll have to give the boxes to Ma after we open the presents.”  Clark smiled widely, and it was his own smile - not Clark Kent’s, not Superman’s, not Kal-El’s, or maybe all three at once. “She’s been trying to hide her presents for me since my vision first manifested.  I expect she’ll like the boxes more than the gift I got her.”  
  
“Tell Martha that if she ever needs extras or replacements, it’ll be no trouble to make them.” She didn’t hug her cousin this time, either, but now it was only because his arms were full of presents in boxes. There was still enough hurt and anger between them to prick her fingers on, but they were both remembering how to enjoy small surprises. That was something. “Now go, before she decides you’re late and begins trying to hang things herself. She may not be my aunt, but Martha Kent is not a woman I wish to see break her hip.”  
  
“I’ll make sure she avoids ladders.”  Still smiling, Clark shifted the gifts to get a better grip on them and shook his head at the thought of what his mother - stubborn and independent and sure-handed even with frail bones and aged eyes - might get up to if he wasn’t on time.  “Wish Bruce and Richard a merry Christmas for me.  And tell Barbara that there’s a gift for her on the Watchtower, from the League... Hal insists on sending it himself, so he needs a drop point.”  Another chuckle, perhaps an acknowledgement of the collective absurdity of the secrets that defined all their lives, and then he vanished out the door and into the sky in the blur of motion that no human eye could have followed.  
  
 _He does fly beautifully,_ Kara sighed to herself, shutting the door behind him and casting a long look around the dimly lit foyer. _Even if he has tried to trap me into mouthing the words of this human occasion again._


	3. Chapter 3

“Those movies Drake and Grayson insist that I watch have taught me only one thing of value: Bah.  Humbug.”  Damien Wayne sat beside Kara on the landing overlooking the den, where Bruce, Richard, and Tim were gathered, talking quietly among themselves and occasionally bursting into song as they decorated the mantle.  
  
Kara rolled over - and subtly up into the air - to look at him without quite taking her eyes off the curious progression of ceremonies in the den below “I have been making much use of that same phrase myself, of late. Was the version to which they subjected you also occupied by talking puppets? I found that most curious.”  
  
“Mice and ducks.  The mouse was annoyingly squeaky.”  Damien glared at Tim, as was his usual habit.  “Exceptionally cloyingly sweet mice and ducks.”  
  
“I was not aware that our father... sang.” Kara touched the word with her mouth curiously, as though the very idea was somehow foreign.  
  
“Only at Christmas.  Mostly.  Sometimes, when he thinks no one is listening, he hums... but only down in the Cave.”  Damien shook his head at the absurdity of the idea.  “But this is the only time he lets anyone else hear him.”  
  
Kara lay on the air and watch the decking of the tree in silence, sharing the half-comfortable stillness with her youngest 'brother.' Curiously, she found few of the irritations with Damien that others of the family seemed to - he was a warrior by birth and by caste, and he had a warrior’s mind. This was the natural order of things, as far as Kara was concerned, and it was a curious thing to ask a warrior to think in the fashion of a security officer or a detective. Still, the Earth was full of curious things, and Bruce’s training rarely seemed to run amiss.  
  
“Do you miss your mother at this time of the year?” she asked at last, her voice soft and too cooly curious to be offensive.  
  
“Do you miss your nightmares when you’re not having them?”  Damien’s voice held no bitterness, just an odd note of regret hidden under a thick veil of dismissal.  “I never miss my mother.  I miss the things she might have taught me... but my father seems to be doing an adequate job with my education.”  
  
Kara nodded softly, acknowledging the statement without judgement, then allowed herself a small smile that no one else in the house - perhaps not even Bruce - would possibly have understood. “Sometimes I do miss my nightmares, when they’re of Krypton.”  
  
“Then you do understand.”  Damien nodded appreciatively.  “Did Krypton have terrible beasts?  I prefer when Drake makes me read about terrible beasts over the mice and ducks.”  
  
“Our share, perhaps. Most of the great terrors were wiped out before my time, but the science guild had extensive paleontological and biological records. I did two of my year-reports on them, when I was younger. I could easily send you the files as a...” Kara paused, and her lips curved in a laughing little smile. “As a Christmas gift.”  
  
“As long as you don’t expect me to sing when I open it.”  Damien looked down as Bruce once again broke into song, and shook his head.  “He’s usually not quite this... embarrassing.”  
  
“It’s strangely affecting. Charming. I suspect the song of having some infectious quality that affects my judgement.” It was too easy to wind Damien up, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t fun. “I may start joining in at any moment.”  
  
“If you do that, I’m leaving.”  Damien turned his glare on Kara.  “And you’re not getting your present.”  
  
“Cruel brother,” Kara sighed, her eyes sparkling with Claire’s mischief, “you drive a hard bargain. I accept.”  
  
“Claire!”  Richard’s voice carried up the stairs.  “Come down here... we need help hanging the garland from the ceiling!”  
  
Kara threw Damien a look, recieved a roll of his eyes in return, then rose to her feet and bounced up off the landing like a springboard, twisting a long aerial corkscrew down to land in front of Richard and prod him very gently in the chest with her fingertip. “What did I say,” she inquired in a tone of arch displeasure, “about drafting me to help with your decorations, artificial or otherwise?”  
  
“That I should, and in fact would, absolutely do so under no circumstances.”  Richard pressed the long string of garland into Kara’s hands.  “It needs to go around the base of the ceiling... and perhaps some mistletoe near the door?”  
  
She held the blossoms in her hands and looked up into the clear blue of his eyes, the edges of her mouth twitching with a smile she couldn’t quite resist. “You are an impossible man, Richard Grayson. Absolutely impossible.”  
  
“I know.”  He winked, then looked up the stairs again.  “And you, Damien... you have to help with the tree!  Alfred bought you an ornament, and Alfred insists that the owners of each ornament put it on.”  
  
Damien muttered something about feeding Alfred his own teapot as he came slowly down the stairs, and Kara started to laugh. She lifted into the air, toes leaving the floor like a breath of rising mist, and brushed her mouth against Richard’s as she came level with him. Then she was past him, rising toward the vaulted ceiling and already evaluating where best to attach the garland. Beneath her, Bruce and Tim were still singing and Damien grumbling as Richard and Alfred herded him toward the tree. Quite without meaning to, Kara began to hum along with the tune.  
  
Christmas, it seemed, was infectious.  
  
It was also fattening, or would have been if she’d been possessed of a human’s metabolism - the extraordinary and inordinate variety of elaborate meal dishes, sweets and beverages that Alfred seemed determined to ply them with as Christmas Eve darkened from snowy afternoon toward evening was sufficient to defeat even Richard and Damien’s appetites, and she was silently astonished at the delight with which Bruce seemed to address himself to the food. It was exceedingly unusual in a man who most often seemed to regard culinary pursuits as an odious necessity imposed by a body which did not subsist itself purely on willpower, and she could not help wondering at it.  
  
As the last serving of dessert was finally finished, and even Damien could stomach no more sweets - he was done in by the third bowl of pudding - Bruce rose to his feet, leading the others into the den and lighting a fire.  Alfred was the first to speak, telling a story of his youth in a boarding school in England and a caper involving the school’s football trophy.  Then went Richard, who spoke of his efforts at convincing the circus lion tamer to let him feed the great cats, just once.  Bruce surprised the others with a tale of himself as a young man, newly returned to Gotham after his years away, meeting Jim Gordon and his adopted daughter for the first time together. Tim described a particularly exhilarating night following Batman around town on his bike, peering through rain-spackled binoculars and piecing together one more little piece of the puzzle that would lead to him becoming Robin.  
  
Kara sat and listened, folded into the corner of one of the couches, dark hair spilled around her face and a glass of champagne still dangling from her fingers. It was impossible to ignore the intimacy of the moment, the trust and honor of being allowed to sit and listen to these private moments from the lives of men who existed in the shadow of so many secrets, and yet the familial warmth in the room tangled in her throat and stuck to her skin. If she had been Claire Wayne in truth, born in a ghetto and educated in a library, perhaps it would have been different - she might have told a story about slipping out of class to meet a boy, about the first time she understood mathematics, about the first time her ailing mother told her about Bruce Wayne. Especially the last, she realized, because Claire would have wanted to cut them as much as she would have wanted to be embraced by them.  
  
It was a good story, when she constructed it in her head: rich and thick with emotion, alive with detail, but there was no truth in it at all. Her stories were a world and a lifetime away - 27.1 light-years and almost two millennia (non-relativistic), to be precise - and the thought of trying to conjure those ghosts here in this room, tonight, nearly made her feel ill.  
  
Then she saw the look on Damien’s face, the iron-masked dread of having to tell a story of her own, and the thought of staying silent fled. How much keener must his hurt be, to have been raised by the enemies of his father and to have no fitting stories at all to tell this night? So she threw back the champagne with a toss of her head, leaned forward and held up her hand, fingers spread for their attention.  
  
Richard caught the look in her eyes, and started to speak before she finished drawing breath for her own story.  “It’s starting to get late... maybe we should go to bed?  We’ve all got an early morning coming up.”  
  
Alfred harumphed his gentle disapproval, and Kara smiled faintly. “After I finish, Richard. My bed won’t be any warmer for you getting to it sooner.”  
  
Tim blinked, swallowing hard to avoid laughing with hot chocolate still in his mouth. Kara flashed him a playful smile, enjoying the subtle blush on his cheeks, and carefully keep her eyes off Damien. _You owe me, little warrior,_ she thought at him silently. Then she breathed out all her air in one slow stream, letting her lungs ache emptily for thirty full seconds before drawing in fresh oxygen. It was a calming technique Bruce had taught her, and it was surprisingly effective for a product of human meditative theories.  
  
“When I was thirteen,” she began slowly, taking her time with the words so that she could structure each sentence properly, “I was entirely terrified about taking my third examination boards. It’s one of the most important in one’s life - not as pivotal as the day you choose your specialization at sixteen, but it still defines the whole course of your future work in the Science Guild. My uncle Jor-El was chosen as an _aksha’rem_ … you don’t have the word for it, really, though ‘inventor’ might come closest. A discoverer and creator of new things. My mother was chosen as what you would call an engineer - an applier of ideas to produce better results. Very prestigious. Expectations were high for me, of course. Not as high as they would have been for Kal, but still very high.  
  
“I’d studied hard, I’d rehearsed the formal greetings a thousand times, but I was still irrationally convinced that my examiners would despise me and that they would discover some hidden fault in my education that would condemn me to a lifetime of rote laboratory experimentation or a position as an encyclopedist - a collater of the work of others. I couldn’t tell my parents, of course, or Uncle Jor; they’d _passed_ their examinations, after all, and were so respected in their fields. I would have gone to Aunt Lara, who always had the right words to say, but she was away on a research trip. So I sulked about the house, obsessed over the smallest details of my presentation, and was generally quite intolerable.”  
  
As Kara spoke, Bruce and Tim leaned forward, interested.  Damien turned sideways in his chair, facing away from her, though the slight twitching of his ear and neck muscles said that he was focusing on listening even as he feigned disinterest.  Alfred rose from his seat long enough to refill Kara’s tea, and Richard folded his hands in his lap, looking concerned for her over events that had long since passed. It was entirely too like him, and she could not help giving him a small smile of reassurance before she continued. “At last, I hit upon a most unscientific idea - something I can only ascribe to my dear friend Thara Ak-Var, who heard Rao’s voice in a way I never had the chance to understand before....” Memory and pain caught her, choked her, tried to steal her voice with the sweet gold of Thara’s hair and the misty distance of the eyes that had never been far from hers when her foster-sister was near. She shook it away with an effort, closing her eyes against the tears, and hid her hurt behind one of Claire’s roguish smiles. “In any case, I decided that what I really needed to be sure that I obtained the outcome I wanted from my boards was a sunfire blossom, one of the signs of Rao’s favor that appeared at dawn each day if you knew just where to look. I, of course, had no idea at all where to look or what I was doing or how to safely collect one. Needless to say, I didn’t let any of those minor details concern me.”  
  
“Why would you?”  Tim smiled.  “The impossible is just another small hurdle on one’s way, after all.”  
  
“Exactly.” Kara let the laugh chase her pain a little farther away and opened her eyes again, letting them wander from the fire to the tree, tracing the reflections of the light through the colored glass of the low-hanging ornaments. “I subverted three of the household help-bots to my mission with a little judicious rewiring, bundled myself up in my winter clothes and set out in the dead of night with a map of sunfire concentrations I’d sneaked out of my mother’s database the night before. It was terribly cold, with a wind that howled through the crystal formations and shook the few trees still standing in that season, and I remember that I was afraid. I’d never left the house alone at night, you see, and all I could think about were the sharp teeth of my mother’s animal specimens and the fact that some of them might be out in the darkness waiting for me to hover by on my little improvised tripod of help-bots and snap me up like a prize treat. I must have thought about turning back a hundred times, but I didn’t - I still don’t know why, except that I had somehow convinced myself that without that sunfire blossom I was entirely doomed. So I kept on through the dark, peering at my ridiculous little map and flashing my hand-light at every possible cliff and crevasse. Finally, just as the sky was starting to brighten with the first of Rao’s light, I looked down and realized that I was hovering in the middle of a field of dull black bulbs half again the length of my arm. I stopped to stare at them, because I had no idea what they were, and then Rao came over the horizon and the bulbs broke apart and filled the air with a rain of red gold. You see, they were sunfire blossoms, every last one of them. I was covered head-to-toe in the pollen, sneezing and coughing, any hope of discreetly slipping back into the house lost, but I’d found my blessing charm.”  
  
There was a wistful smile on Bruce’s face, matched by one from Alfred.  Tim was giggling softly, while Richard was smiling at the thought of Kara covered in pollen.  Damien, however, was the one who spoke.  “I... I once stole my grandfather’s favorite dagger.  I had to know if I could.”  He added no further detail to the story, and his tone made clear that he intended to offer none.  
  
“My parents were furious with me,” Kara murmured, not looking at Damien just as he did not look at her, but letting her eyes linger on the fire and the memories only she could see. “I thought I would never be allowed out of the house unescorted again. But my Uncle Jor laughed when he heard, and then I knew it was acceptable that I felt not guilt but a kind of wonder at my foolishness.”  
  
It was not quite right to say that Kara did not hear the murmured agreement among the others to retire to bed, or that she was not aware of them slipping from the room one and two at a time. She was a Kryptonian on Earth, senses sharp enough to pluck a sound from across the word or trace the orbits of electrons, and she knew very well that they were leaving. It was more accurate to say that she was too preoccupied with thoughts of a long-vanished home and the weight of the grief in her heart to pay any attention to them beyond that distant awareness.  
  
The log in the fire cracked at last, fibrous wood replaced by carbon that would not bear the weight, and the flames began to gutter. She started slightly, realizing she had no idea how long had passed, and only remembered the champagne flute in her hand when she heard the glass ring softly with the strain of her fractionally tighter grip.  
  
The room was dark and empty, lit only by the dull glow of the dying fire, and she was suddenly so lonely and full of rage that it took all her discipline to walk to the windows and throw them open before hurling herself up toward the cold and distant stars, the tears on her cheeks freezing in thin air as they fell free of her aura and the shattered fragments of glass trailing after her melting like tiny comets in their brief, violent descent.  
  
Out beyond the last feeble sparks of Earth’s magnetosphere, in cold vacuum thick with radiation lethal to any less indestructible form of life, Kara Zor-El wept unheard and mourned her dead. **  
**


	4. Chapter 4

No one had asked about Kara’s absence much of the night before when she came down to a sumptuous breakfast Christmas morning, or about the source of her preoccupation. Whether that was because they already suspected the answer or were too polite to pry, she cared very little - in either case, it was another reason that she prefered residing in Wayne Manor to any other option she could readily conjure. It spared her prying concern and isolated loneliness simultaneously, which was something she could never have effectively explained to her cousin.  
  
Presents had been opened immediately after breakfast, an arrangement she had concluded was inescapably sensible when she realized that neither Richard nor Timothy would be able to focus on anything other than verifying their deductions about their gifts until the matter was disposed of. There had been a small outbreak of chaos, wrapping tossed everywhere and dignity mostly abandoned, accented by Damian’s increasingly sarcastic speculation on what use he would have for any of the various items he received, then had come well over an hour in the den drinking eggnog and _discussing_ the gifts.  Bruce had played an old vinyl record Alfred had bought for him - a Christmas album by someone named Elvis Presley  - in its entirety, and, apart from Damien and Tim’s unusually subdued bickering, the entire household had listened to it quietly.  Then had come a group video call to Barbara, with a chance for everyone to say hello and wish her a merry Christmas (and for Kara - in Claire’s voice, of course - to twit both Barbara and Richard delightfully in front of the others). That had been followed by another call - this one by phone - to Jim Gordon, and then the group had broken up for perhaps an hour for each member to place their own holiday calls in private. Kara had stubbornly intended to make no such calls, a determination reinforced by repeated lectures to herself about how she had no intention of humoring Kal or his foster-parents, but in the end the thought of their disappointment got the better of her and she endured a ten minute phone conversation that was as warm on the Kansas end of the line as it was awkward on her own.  
  
It took a concerted effort to disentangle herself before her patience wore too thin for politeness, but she managed it, and was relieved of the need to share her discomfort with any of the others by the discovery that dinner would be served earlier than it had been the last few days. The food was excellent, of course, and the others set about devouring it with such attention and energy that she was able to pass the entire meal without saying anything more complicated than a brief thanks to Alfred for the feast. Richard and Timothy captured Damien between them and drafted him into a game which was apparently called ‘Go Fish’ - a human pastime that it appeared Damien might well be as unfamiliar with as she was - and Alfred set about clearing the table, which allowed her the opportunity to slip away from the merrymaking and out onto the south terrace for a few minutes of silence disturbed only by the moan of the wind through the grotesques and crenulations of the old manor.  
  
It was an indescribable relief.  
  
“So, this is where you snuck off to.”  Bruce’s voice preceded the sound of his footsteps, and he leaned against the railing beside her.  “Beautiful night.”  
  
“It will be,” she agreed, eyes tracing the red glow of the western sky where the last gasps of the daylight were slowly dying away. “And I did not sneak.”  
  
“Of course not.  You simply moved away, quietly enough that it would take effort even for you, and when you were certain no one was watching.  A coincidence, obviously.”  Bruce kept his eyes on the stars.  “You’ve been quiet, today.”  
  
There was no denying that observation, so she didn’t try. She turned and arched an eyebrow at him instead, her voice crisp with a dry, skeptical humor. “You don’t believe in coincidence, Bruce.”  
  
“Of course I don’t.  So there must be an alternate explanation.”  
  
“Other than a desire to enjoy the beautiful sunset?”  
  
“That could be.”  Bruce nodded.  “The day is almost over.”  
  
“Yes. Almost.” She looked away from him and back out over the snow to the horizon, watching the dying light stain the snow the color of fresh blood or the towers of Kandor by Rao’s light, and felt tears sting her eyes again. “I understand that it is of great sentimental importance for you and your sons. I hope I have not been a … what is your Earth phrase, a ghost at the feast?”  
  
“You haven’t.  That hasn’t prevented my being concerned for you..”  Bruce turned to look at her.  “I often am, but... you’ve been more distant, these last few days.”  
  
“You mean the past two weeks,” she corrected him quietly, eyes still fixed on the gathering dark.  
  
“Exactly.”  He nodded.  “You’ve not really spoken of why.”  
  
“Why is it that humans insist on speaking about every emotion that touches their hearts, _kashak’an_?” The ancient Kryptonian word lingered in the air, the meaning as intricate as the play of light on the crystal snow. Her cousin would have rendered it teacher, or perhaps mentor, but that was a foreigner’s effort - to a native speaker, the idea was infinitely more complex.  
  
It suited Bruce perfectly.  
  
“Because it is part of how we show that we care, and part of how we find ways to help.”  Bruce offered her a smile.  “Because we want to be part of those emotions you are feeling.”  
  
From anyone else on the planet, she could have throw those words back in his face. It would have been natural to demand to know how he could possible imagine what she felt, exiled and stripped of the only world she had ever known, a stranger adrift in a foreign land whose natives she sometimes barely liked. Had anyone else said it, she might well have done so, but if anyone began to understand what she had lost and how it hurt her... if there was anyone who could, it was Bruce Wayne, who had seen his parents murdered before his eyes when he was a mere child and had fled to wander the world rather than stay in the mansion that had once been their house and was no longer his. Who had returned, only to make it something more than a mausoleum but less than a home. Who lived most truly, it sometimes seemed to her, not in the rooms of the manor but in the depths of the caves beneath.  
  
To lecture him about his inadequate understanding of loss was beyond her, even with her heart tangled in cutting wire and bleeding bitter poison.  
  
“How do you do this?” she asked at last, her voice soft and without accusation - she did not sound angry, even to her own ears, but like a child lost in the twilight and frightened of the fall of night. “How do you find any joy, any peace in this holiday of warmth and family without them?”  
  
“By celebrating with the family I do have.  With Alfred, Richard, Timothy, and Damien.  And, now, with you.”  His smile was bright and wistful.  “We remember the family we have lost, and celebrate the family we have found.  And, when the night is coldest, we huddle together for warmth.”  
  
The smile she offered him in answer was bleak as winter. “I’m cold through and through, Bruce. All I can think of, these past few days, is the broken ruin of what used to be my life and my home - rubble floating cold and dead in space. I don’t know what warmth I have to offer.”  
  
“Then, this year, take the warmth that is offered.”  Bruce touched her hand.  “Though I would not be certain that you are offering no warmth.”  
  
She laughed softly, bleak and weary, but did not withdraw from his touch. “My cousin might disagree with you. I heaped no little scorn on him when he tried to persuade me to go with him to Kansas. I thought that at least here....” she let out her breath slowly and finally managed to meet his eyes again, the dark sapphire depths of her own gaze exhausted and stripped of protective pride. “At least here,” she finally went on, “I would be among those who might have some idea of why I made such a poor vessel for your spirit of Christmas.”  
  
“You have certainly made Damien’s Christmas easier... with you here, he has had someone else to explore the holiday with.  And...”  Bruce paused.  “Vessel?”  
  
“Container? Embodiment?” She tilted her head at him curiously. “Perhaps we have discovered another fault in my English vocabulary. In Kryptonian I would say _ayer_ \- one who is open to influence or possession by a spirit through achieving the appropriate meditative state.”  
  
“There is no ‘spirit of Christmas’ in that sense.  The idea is... a mindset, rather than a spectre.”  Bruce shook his head.  “Embracing those you hold dear, good feelings for your fellow beings, comfort and joy.”  
  
Kara stared at him for a moment, her lips twitching with the beginnings of a smile. “So your singing is not some form of infectious spirit-madness, but a genuine evidence of warm kinship feelings for your fellow humans? Do you normally refrain from the punishment of criminals in this season, then, and repurpose your vehicles for the transport of children’s treats?”  
  
“We stay off the streets unless we are desperately needed, particularly on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  As for the repurposing of the vehicles... they’re not terribly well-suited to that, I’m afraid.  But if you look through the Wayne Industries ledgers, you’ll see a sizeable donation each year of cash and use of company resources to Gotham Santa... it’s a charity I founded not long after my return to deliver toys and supper to needy families in the city.”  
  
Now she couldn’t keep the smile off her face - her mentor was so impossibly serious, so literal-minded at times, and now the antic sense of mischief she’d been cultivating to inform her performance of Claire was prickling to life. “No bat-shaped cookies, then? No candy-canes on tiny bat-imprinted parachutes?”  
  
“Maybe next year.”  Bruce’s serious demeanor cracked slightly, and a small smile slowly appeared on that stern mouth.  
  
“Maybe so,” she agreed, laughter finally bubbling up through the sharp-edged hurt in her chest and blossoming in the air in clean silvery peals of delight. His smile grew, became something almost natural, and she felt some of her own ache ease to see him comforted. Perhaps there was something in this huddling for warmth idea after all, she decided, and offered him her arm. “If we don’t go back inside, Damien may murder Richard and Timothy with a deck of playing cards. I do not think that would enliven the evening, do you?”  
  
“Perhaps not.”  He took her arm.  “Besides, it is nearly time for the candles.”  He sobered a bit at that thought, though his expression was not the stoic pain he usually carried.  
  
“Ah. Yet another ritual with which I am not familiar.” She chuckled without too much sharpness as they passed into the house. “Barbara asked me to ‘light Sarah’s candle’ for her. I agreed, though I have no idea whatsoever what she was speaking about, so perhaps you could explain?” His arm shifted under her hand, the faintest shiver of reflex, and she started slightly as she realized it was his body’s natural reaction to ward off chill being released from rigid control. “You were cold and you didn’t tell me,” she rebuked him quietly, her smile turning wry. “Your body temperature could have dropped dangerously in that wind.”  
  
“I would have come inside long before that happened.”  Bruce winked, leading her into the den.  “Every year, at Christmas, we light candles for the people who ought to be here but could not.  My parents, and Richard’s.  Timothy’s father.  Alfred’s brother.”  He gestured to the candles, lined up on the mantle.  “Barbara’s mother.”  
  
“I thought that Barbara’s mother’s name was Thelma, and her father’s Roger? That they died when she was on the edge of adolescence, which led to her adoption by the Commissioner and the wife who she had been named in honor of?”  
  
“Barbara loved Sarah... thought of her as very much her mother.  They were close throughout Jim’s marriage to Sarah.  And the Joker killed her...”  Bruce sighed, a moment of guilt crossing his face before he continued.  “Sarah Essen Gordon is the person Barbara misses most, who, of those in her life, most ought to be here.”  
  
There was little Kara could say to that which would encompass the sudden weight of understanding just what Barbara had asked of her, so she shook her head slightly and touched Bruce’s hand in silent comfort instead. _More lives that monster has destroyed,_ she whispered in the secret corners of her heart. _One more reason to see that it doesn’t happen again._  
  
She’d heard Alfred call the boys in from their game with his usual dry aspersion and an anticipation of the right moment which she sometimes suspected must be metahuman in origin, and their bickering was already quieting by the time they followed him into the room and gathered around the hearth. No one spoke, not even a whisper, as Bruce gathered up the matches and handed them to Alfred, who lit the first and moved to the small brace of candles arranged at the extreme left of the mantle.  
  
“Clarence.”  Alfred said the name, with no further embellishment, though there were tears in his eyes as he pressed the match to the wick of the first candle, setting it alight.  
  
There were names for each of the others in turn, some she knew and some that she did not - Alfred’s father and other lost family, Bruce’s parents and Richard’s, Timothy’s mother and father, Jason Todd and Vesper Fairchild. She stood when it was her turn and lit the candle for Sarah Essen Gordon, whispering the name with the care of any ritual invocation, and then sat down again as the names went on for some while longer. The mantle glittered like a tiny river of stars, each candle’s point of light bright and sharp in the near-darkness of the room, and she could hear the catches in Richard’s breathing and the subtle clearing of tears from Alfred’s throat, the way that Timothy breathed when he needed to control his emotions and Damien’s silent, restless sense of uncertainty. He had no candles to light tonight, no absent family he wished were present, and if he would not have taken it as a mortal insult she would have reached out to him in comfort. She stood and said nothing instead, until all of the candles were lit, and then turned to Bruce with an unspoken question in her eyes. _What now?_  
  
Bruce studied her for what felt like a long moment, almost in expectation, but when she found nothing to offer him but her uncertainty he cleared his throat and explained. “Normally, we tell stories of those not present... the ones for whom the candles were lit, and those who are alive but away from us.  We invite them in, to share the night with us.”  
  
Richard put his hand on Timothy’s shoulder, nudging the younger boy into one of the chairs before taking his own, and a little smile played on his lips as he let his eyes unfocus with memory. “My parents used to have this big map of the country with pins in it for every place we performed, and....”  
  
“Wait,” Kara whispered, then stiffened and spoke more loudly as urgency seized her. “Richard, wait. Please.” He started and stared at her, not so much angry as confused, but she shook her head and held up her hand to ask him for his silence and he gave it. They all did, and she stood still in the candlelit room and wrestled with the burning, desperate impulse inside her that she didn’t understand, couldn’t begin to imagine how to express, but that would not let her go until she gave it voice.  
  
 _We invite them in, to share the night with us._  
  
“Wait for me,” she told them all softly, then ran from the room so swiftly that they doubtless saw nothing but the blur of motion. She raced up the stairs, heart hammering against her ribs and too taut with emotion not to use all the speed she safely could, and seized the box Kal had left with her the day before Christmas Eve - the one she hadn’t been able to stand the thought of opening, once she saw what was inside it. She pulled it open now, exposing the delicate-looking globe of crystal in its fine gravity cradle that would suspend and turn it in precise imitation of the rotation and seasons of Krypton. There was no denying the care of its craft, the topographical detail and the careful labeling of cities and towns and even neighborhoods that carried all the way down to the microscopic level, and the crystal itself was a work of art - a perfect replication of Kryptonian memory-crystal, harder than titanium and light as glass. It had seemed a cruel gift when she had first seen it, a mockery of everything that she had lost and that Kal barely remembered at all, but now … now she could see the love in its making, if not feel it, and was grateful to have it. Grateful, because it would serve the purpose she so desperately needed it to.  
  
She flashed down the stairs again, prize in hand, and moved to the mantle to shift a few of the lit candles carefully to each side. Once she’d made room, she adhered the gravity cradle to the mantle with a delicate touch of one control and set the crystalline globe spinning for winter in Kandor with another. Then she stepped back and finally looked to Bruce and the others for permission, her cheeks flushed at the presumption her own urgency had driven her to.  
  
For a long moment, no one spoke.  Then, Bruce took her hand, guiding her to the large sofa to sit between him and Richard.  Richard offered her a small smile, taking her free hand and squeezing it gently, before speaking, as if he hadn’t been interrupted at all.  “I never saw them put the pins in.  Not once.  I’d go to bed in a town, and when I woke up, the pin for that town would already be there...”  
  
Kara sat with her head tucked against Richard’s shoulder, her fingers wrapped tightly around Bruce’s and her eyes on the softly illuminated surface of the home she had lost and the candle-lit vigil of the one she had found, and for the first time in more than two weeks she could breathe cleanly and deeply without feeling as though something inside her was going to fracture with the breath. _Merry Christmas, Aunt Lara and Uncle Jor,_ she began softly in the privacy of her own thoughts while Richard conjured up images of clowns and lions and impossible bursts of flight without wings. _Merry Christmas, Thara. Merry Christmas, Reia and Tebra and Wyren and Bal._  
  
 _Merry Christmas, father. Merry Christmas, mother._  
  
Bruce squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back. “Merry Christmas,” she whispered into Richard’s shoulder, just loudly enough for every one of the humans of the House of Wayne who had somehow stolen past the armor of her heart and made themselves her family. She thought of the farmhouse in Kansas, of the Kents tucked around the fire and Lois Lane’s head on her cousin’s shoulder the way hers was resting on Richard’s, and she understood what Bruce had meant about the spirit of goodwill. Richard was finishing now, and somehow she knew she wouldn’t be allowed to speak last this time.  
  
Kara Zor-El smiled, and dredged her memory for a story that would have made her mother laugh, just a little, when she thought no one would hear it over Aunt Lara’s mirth. “Merry Christmas, Kal,” she murmured, knowing he would hear, and then lifted her head and fixed Damien with an inviting smile. “Let me tell you about the time I was determined to use my uncle’s temporal lensing array,” she began, “and about a certain set of key crystals that just _happened_ to have have come into my possession at about that time...”  
  
Somewhere - several hundred somewheres, in fact - a radio station began to play _I’ll Be Home for Christmas._ Kara paused to laugh under her breath, shook her head, then went on with her story by the light of the fire as the Wayne family gathered their ghosts for a long night of warmth and memories of joy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there it is, finally - finished, in spite of its best efforts to escape and run loose another ten thousand words. A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you, and we hope that your holidays are as warm and bright with family as ours have been.


End file.
